We must make this country a nation of equal protection under the law with equal opportunity for everyone. If we truly would like to be post-racial one day, we cannot continue to live in denial, or turn a blind eye towards reality, or remain complacent today. It's as simple as that.

For those who genuinely believed the election of Barack Obama was the arrival of a post-racial America, I hope their examination of the significant opposition to the legitimacy of his first term as president and the continued intransigent opposition to him by a Republican-controlled Congress might provide some degree of a reality check on their belief.

Just as many people took the election of Barack Obama as a sign of a new post-racial America, some might take Love's election to mean that post-racialism has reached Utah. But the truth of the matter is that the election of a racial-minority candidate tells us very little about racial relations.

I walked the walk, talked the talk, and now had a student ID card showing that I am an educated person. However, this didn't stop a store owner from turning up her nose at me when I entered her shop and having one of her associates follow me around. And this didn't stop the suspicious stares of residents in a small town where I visited one of my friends this past year.

Dear White People is sure to become both a cult hit and a staple on college campuses across the country, and I'm glad for it since the movie ultimately ends with more questions than answers. And with an issue as multi-faceted as racism, that is as it should be.

The election of Barack Obama was the Lexington and Concord in the latest great battle of race in America. We are a nation at war with itself. For all of our desire to move beyond the narrow confines of many of the events of our tragic history, we cannot. The president's election gave new life to what had been lying dangerously dormant for the better part of 50 years.

As students return to school this fall with the echoes of gunshots and angry protests reverberating across the country, how will teachers address the lessons of Ferguson? Will they even be able to do so?

With the controversy over the racist remarks of Cliven Bundy and Donald Sterling, one a rural cattle rancher in Nevada, the other an urbane California billionaire, we might want to reconsider just how "post-racial" America's race relations have really become.

We might not be in the back of the bus, and we might not drink from separate water fountains, but racial discrimination is very much alive in 2014. Anyone who ever doubted that reality can look at the events of the past week.

Last week, President Obama unveiled his My Brothers Keeper initiative one day after the anniversary of the murder of Trayvon Martin and as the nation still grapples with the hung jury on the murder charge in the Michael Dunn case,.

In a film class this past semester, 60 undergraduate students, most of whom had never heard of white privilege, were confronted with its realities -- realities that are evident in the tropes, themes, characters and concerns of blockbuster movies.

A post-racial society is more like a continuous improvement process that requires incremental improvements over time rather than a "breakthrough" improvement that happens all at once as the result of a black American as president.

Whose bodies and lives will this grand social vision of a post-racial world benefit especially when considering the counter-investment in notions of "blackness" that post-racial propagandists seem to maintain?

While Black female creative professionals try to gain footing in the wake of such staggering facts, it is no wonder then that the rise of the Black girl crush has emerged. In fact, it has crested in my own life, as I have been working freelance since May 2011.